u/The-Skull-Foundry

This is my sleeper workshop setup.

From the outside it just looks like a normal coffee table in my living room.

The entire workspace is only 1 metre wide, but it handles everything from wirework and assembly to photography prep and packaging.

Tools, materials and equipment all disappear back into the table when I'm finished, so the workshop effectively vanishes when not in use.

Most people assume you need a dedicated room, garage or shed to start making things. This setup has made me question how much space is actually necessary.

I'm curious what the smallest workspace you've successfully worked from has been.

Bought a tube today for the first time in years and the first thing I noticed was how much empty space there is around the crisps.

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I genuinely don't remember them being this small compared to the tube.

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Have Pringles shrunk over the years or is my memory playing tricks on me?

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Ok last post got taken down as evidence was not provided so I have found data and provided links

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The post was written as a question because I had not bought Pringles for years and genuinely wasn't sure whether I was remembering correctly.

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Since posting, I have found evidence that Pringles have reduced both product size and pack weight in various markets over time.

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Pringles FAQ:

https://www.pringles.com/nz/faqs.html

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Pringles state:

"both the chip and can are a little bit smaller"

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Article discussing the reduction in chip and can size:

https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/life/eat-drink/2016/08/18/pringles-getting-smaller

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Consumer report documenting pack weight reductions:

https://konsument.at/lebensmittel-check/pringles-original-2

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Given this evidence, the observation appears to be based on an actual reduction in product size rather than faulty memory.

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I hope this is enough evidence

I started with the sketch and ended up with the finished pendant shown in the other photos.

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The original idea was a tiger eye bead suspended between two concentric 1mm stainless steel frames. The final piece ended up using a red glass bead, but the overall structure stayed fairly close to the concept.

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A few questions for people who work with heavier wire:

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• What do you consider a sensible scale for 1mm stainless?

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• Would you form the circles first and bend the top section afterward, or build from the top down?

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• How much do you try to recover a design when it starts drifting from the original plan?

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• Does this feel worth refining further?

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• Looking at the finished scale, would 0.6mm wire improve the piece or make it lose too much presence?

Over the last few days I've been experimenting with a few different weave styles using 304 stainless steel wire and soft. Some seem to work with the stiffness of the material better than others, but I'm still finding consistency difficult, especially over longer sections.

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The blue weave is probably the one giving me the most trouble. Small differences in tension seem to show up very quickly and once the wire starts drifting it's difficult to bring it back into line. The black weave was an interesting surprise because the stiffness that causes problems elsewhere actually seemed to help the structure hold its shape.

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For those of you who regularly work with harder wire, do you have any tips for improving control and keeping spacing consistent? Is it mostly a matter of practice and repetition, or are there techniques that helped things click for you?

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I'd also be interested to hear which weave you think has the most potential.

Yesterday I posted these bracelets because something about the green one was bothering me, but I couldn't work out exactly what. A lot of the comments pointed out things like bead spacing, tension, alignment and colour, which got me looking much more closely at the piece. all were correct answers but it the root of the problem.

In the end I tried something I hadn't done before and used AI to remove all the beads from both bracelets so I could only look at the underlying wire structure. Once the beads were gone the problem became obvious. A few bends in the green weave were much larger than the others, which then affected the bends around them and threw off the rhythm of the whole piece. The beads weren't causing the problem, they were just making an existing structural issue easier to see. I thought some of you might find the method useful if you ever have a piece that feels wrong but you can't quite work out why.

I thought the blue version was teaching me something. The weave started rough, but by the end it felt like the rhythm had finally clicked. So I immediately made a second version, thinking I could take what I'd learned and improve it.

Instead, I got the green one.Technically I had more control. I understood the weave better. I wasn't hesitating as much.But somehow it feels weaker. Looking at them side by side, I can't work out why. The blue one has obvious mistakes, yet it feels stronger to me. The green one feels flatter and less cohesive, even though I knew what I was doing by that point.

What are you seeing that I'm not?

I thought the blue version was teaching me something. The weave started rough, but by the end it felt like the rhythm had finally clicked. So I immediately made a second version, thinking I could take what I'd learned and improve it.

Instead, I got the green one.Technically I had more control. I understood the weave better. I wasn't hesitating as much.But somehow it feels weaker.

Looking at them side by side, I can't work out why. The blue one has obvious mistakes, yet it feels stronger to me. The green one feels flatter and less cohesive, even though I knew what I was doing by that point.

What are you seeing that I'm not?

I've been teaching myself jewellery making through experimentation over the last few months, and this week I stumbled across something interesting.

These two earrings came from the same design family. Looking at them, I thought the solution to improving them would be the same on both pieces.

After making the pair and sitting with them for a while, I realised that wasn't true at all.

What improved one earring actually made the other worse.

The thing I ended up adding wasn't really decorative. It was tiny, but it changed how the piece felt. The best word I've found for it is "ballast".

Not ballast in the physical sense, but visual ballast.

Something that helps distribute visual weight and resolve tension within the design.

What surprised me was that each earring needed a different amount of it. The principle stayed the same, but the solution didn't.

The discovery wasn't really about adding beads. It was the realisation that balance is contextual. You can't always apply the same fix twice and expect the same result.

I'm curious if other makers have had similar moments where a small change ended up teaching a much bigger design lesson.